Poll: How good do you expect Dark Souls 3 to be? (483 votes)

Demon's Souls is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be equally good 2%

Demon's Souls is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be better 1%

Dark Souls is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be worse 22%

Dark Souls is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be equally good 27%

Dark Souls is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be better 5%

Dark Souls II is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be worse 1%

Dark Souls II is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be equally good 4%

Dark Souls II is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be better 2%

Bloodborne is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be worse 4%

Bloodborne is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be equally good 6%

Bloodborne is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be better 3%

Lords of the Fallen is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be worse 2%

Lords of the Fallen is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to equally good 1%

Lords of the Fallen is the Best and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be better 1%

What the fuck is Lords of the Fallen? 12%

Not enough poll options 22%

Results 13%

Greetings sirs, simple enough question; I'll probably write a follow up post in the near future. I believe the last time a similar poll was done the results were like 25/40/20/X as far as distribution goes, no idea how Bloodborne is going to impact this.

It'll probably be equivalent with Dark Souls and Bloodborne, but because it came out after it will receive the Uncharted 3 treatment.

I expect it to be another Souls game. Nothing less and little more. I'm sure I'll put a lot of hours into it and it may be my favorite game of the year, but I'm at the point where the idea of yet another Souls game with the same structure, mechanics and ugly character customization doesn't excite me at all.

I like the first Dark Souls best and think (or hope) that DS 3 will be equally as a good. I played bits of it in the network stress test and it felt pretty damn great. Also there's finally real dual-wielding.

I think expecting it to be at least as good as Dark Souls 1 sets you up for disappointment. That's like expecting every Metroid game to trump Super Metroid - probably not gonna happen.

That said, I expect it to be a good game, but I also think people won't find it as memorable since the formula has been used four times now. They'll play it, praise it, and move on. Or hate it because there's an extra i-frame in the fat roll.

Dark Souls (1) and Bloodborne are somewhat different games and both great, and I expect Dark Souls 3 to be a amalgamation of both, capturing the best of both games, but at the same time not managing to capture the same sense of wonder.

I'm really excited for it. I wasn't for an extended period of time as it just seemed to me as if they were going back to doing the same old thing after the fresh, yet putrid, breeze of air that was Bloodborne. Playing the game convinced me otherwise, the new mechanics mix things up in a way no previous addition to the series has, offering both tactile depth and the potential for in-the-moment decisions that could be the fine difference between life and death.

I also really, really like the aesthetic, everything so colourful yet draped with a layer of gray ash. It seems to me like they're going somewhere with the world-building and the narrative. Dark Souls 2 very much felt like something you could connect to the previous games if you looked hard enough, but now, all of the pieces from the previous games are falling into place in a way that's evident just from the look of the environments. As someone who's been really into the Souls lore, I actually believe they might be able to wrap things up in a satisfying way, and that's no mean task.

I think it will be a great game for people who aren't too invested in the series, and a fantastic game for those who are.

I expect it to be completely, "meh." I have played too much Souls in the past five years and I think that series fatigue will really kick in here. Just for comparison, I am just as excited for DS 3 as I am a new Assasins Creed title.

@humanity: The italicization of your post implies that you yourself are impervious to surprise as opposed to the act of Dark Souls 3 being surprising as something that is unlikely. An interesting usage of the device to say the least.

I expect it to be yet another Dark Souls, probably the best one yet, and I expect that I will still like it far less than Bloodborne. I have almost nothing but good things to say about Dark Souls, but the speed, aesthetics, and just about everything else of Bloodborne are much more up my alley.

IMO, the worst parts of the Dark Souls series has been the PvP/invasions. I loved to play Co-Op a ton, but the PvP stuff kinda got old. It got to the point where if I was invaded, i would just sprint back to the bonfire and let them kill me. I liked Lords of the Fallen for being 100% single player.

Plus, as a guy that routinely plays old games, I want to be able to come back to a game 10 years later and still have a good experience. A game that relies that heavily on online stuff won't be able to offer me the same thing as I experienced the first time. That's why I replay Baldur's Gate regularly, but got burnt out on Dark Souls only after a few playthroughs.

IMO, the worst parts of the Dark Souls series has been the PvP/invasions. I loved to play Co-Op a ton, but the PvP stuff kinda got old. It got to the point where if I was invaded, i would just sprint back to the bonfire and let them kill me. I liked Lords of the Fallen for being 100% single player.

Plus, as a guy that routinely plays old games, I want to be able to come back to a game 10 years later and still have a good experience. A game that relies that heavily on online stuff won't be able to offer me the same thing as I experienced the first time. That's why I replay Baldur's Gate regularly, but got burnt out on Dark Souls only after a few playthroughs.

It's a pain to take your consoles off the internet everytime, but there's nothing stopping you from playing the Souls games offline. Yes, there's a little bit of content that you won't be able to access, but the vast majority of the game is completely playable without connecting to any server. Ten years from now, if you want to start up Dark Souls and play it solo, I bet it will still be a pretty great experience. I played Dark Souls II entirely offline the first time and that was pretty great. Also worth noting that you rarely get invaded in Dark Souls II and you never get invaded in Dark Souls I if you're human.

Something I forgot to mention earlier - it would be cool if From Software tried to do another King's Field game, only this time with a budget!

@fredchuckdave: The italicization meant to put emphasis on the fact that I personally would be surprised if the game was surprising in any way. It's a bit tricky but that is what I meant. Either way, it's going to be more Dark Souls if nothing else, and that means something different to each individual person that is a fan of the franchise.

I don't really see getting tired of the game's formula as been reflective of the game's actual quality. I think Dark Souls 3 will marry Dark Souls 1's build variety/world layout with Bloodborne's speed/depth of combat, and for better or for worse, the people who've already lost interest in the series will just completely bounce off of it, and obsessives like me will see it as something of a final "best of" Souls compilation.

I will never have a transcendental experience with a Souls game the way I did with the original Dark Souls--my first foray into the From Software formula. For me, it was a complete gamechanger. No matter how good a follow up might be, there just isn't a way to replicate the awe and revelation of my first Souls triumph.

So, realistically, I expect Dark Souls 3 to be on the level of Dark Souls 2 and Bloodborne--games of especially high quality that I felt far less passionate about than their predecessor. It'll offer some unique wrinkles, and probably a system here and there that I won't like at all, but it will be largely the thing I've come to anticipate from the studio.

As long as it's better than Dark Souls II, that will be good enough for me. That's kind of where I see this game falling - better than Dark Souls II, but not as good as Dark Souls...maybe on par with Bloodborne. Demon Souls has too special a place in my heart so I don't rank it against the others. It's probably objectively worse than everything except Dark Souls II, but it's still the best because there was nothing like playing that game when it first came out.

Well I know it's not going to be good, that much is evident, but whether it's going to be as bad as Dark Souls is hard to say. I'll know when I count how many times I need to kill the same enemy over and over.

Despite its cool innovations, its drawbacks also led Bloodborne to become the first Souls game I have yet to finish, nevermind finishing it more than once which is also something I've done with every other Souls game.

In light of that, I'm hoping Dark Souls 3 will both be a return to what I liked about the earlier games, while bringing with it some of the good ideas of Bloodborne. I'm still expecting it to feel closer to DS2 than DS1 though, but I wouldn't mind that.

I feel like I really haven't seen or heard that much about it though, so I'm not actually sure what to expect.

Hopefully they learned from Lords of the Fallen and put in some meaty hunk men as the only character option. Who needs character anyway.

I expect Dark Souls 3 to be an attempt at Dark Souls with slightly crisper geometry, same horrid frame rate, in a blander, more desaturated enviroment. Bloodborne was so bad for me (though I love it), and Dark Souls 2's shoddy world design told me the franchise didn't care if someone shat all over it. DS2's Scholar of the whatever also taught me they want money from idiots like me (and they got it cuz the game's great). I expect the "story" to be as obtuse as ever and I expect no attempts at making the game more appealing to the general public.

Still, I'm sure I'll end up buying the PS4 version since they will release the PC version later because of idiots like me who buy it twice and I will LOVE IT and it'll probably end up being my game of the century cuz OMG DARK SOULS THREE! <3<3

I went option 1. Diminishing returns have really kicked in for me on this series, Bloodborne included. The games have all been good, but that first time with Demons Souls was revelatory.

I'm sad people feel this way as Bloodborne revitalized my interest in the souls formula, granted I skipped all the Dark Souls 2 dlc which was supposedly quite good but I had my fill at the time. Dark Souls 3 seems interesting with Miyazaki heading it up since he went in completely the opposite direction with the series making a tighter more focused game with a cohesive world as apose to Dark Souls 2 which was very much not that. I'm really curious which side of the rampant Souls community he'll decide to cater to. Personally i'm just glad that this is (supposedly) the last one. Which means he could really go off the walls crazy if he wanted to. (which I really hope he does)

I don't like the word worse for this because I still expect to enjoy it, but I don't expect it to be as good as dark souls. I just hope they don't take a page from bloodbornes book because while I enjoyed it the first time through, your options for combat were melee, melee or melee with a slow weapon. It's the only souls game I've only played once and don't want to return to it.

Dark Souls 1 is Miyazaki's masterpiece. He'll never make a game better than DS1, and that's totally OK, very few games are better. I'm thinking even with the B team making up most of the dev team, they can still make a great game with Miyazaki, and the A art team. I'm thinking it will be their 2nd best game to date.

I liked Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 pretty equally so I am totally putting my money on "Better" because if they have the formula down well enough for me to dump 80 hours in both of those then this one being built on the Next Gen would mean that all they have to do is not fuck it up and make it look/run better and there ya go. I do hope they go back to the world design of DS1 though the way to world looped back together was really something that was missing from 2.

I answered Demon's Souls is the best (it was) and I expect DS3 to be worse (it will.) I'm basing that off the fact that for me personally, none of the three games released post-Demon's has quite captured what I loved so much about that game. Dark Souls 2 is fantastic, so my frame of mind when approaching DS3 is more about how it will compare to that game. I felt the first Dark Souls has serious balancing issues, and Bloodborne was lousy with samey environments, and utterly lacked depth. Granted, I thought movement in battle felt better than ever, so I would like to see that kind of quick stepping stuff carried over. I hear combat is a lot more fast paced in DS3, so that's a huge plus.

Mostly, I'm going in dark, because I think that's the best way to enjoy these things.

Bloodborne is easily the best playing game that From has made. Dark Souls is the best from a lore/atmosphere perspective. Just combine both (it looks like that's what they're doing) and you get the winning formula.

Throw in the variety of items/equipment/spells/etc. from Dark Souls 2 or surpass that amount and everyone is happy.

Dark Souls is my Call of Duty, I will shamelessly buy all of them. That being said the quality of Souls III will be within its design. Specifically how it balances its stats, weapons and magics. Souls II did a superb job of this but a lackluster job of level design and world building. If they can merge what was good about DaS1 and DaS2 together I will be ecstatic.

I don't expect it to do anything overly new and out of the box but people who expect that from sequels obviously haven't played video games for very long.

Weird questions. While I fall cleanly in the order of Dark Souls>Dark Souls II>Bloodborne>Demon's Souls, there are things I REALLY like about Dark Souls II and Bloodborne that set them apart from Dark Souls. Demon's Souls has zero redeeming qualities over the other three - it's just cool for being the first one there.

Honestly, I could see it being the weakest of the three Dark Souls games, but if it ends up being a surprising, unique-feeling and challenging game, I'll be pleased with it. None of them have felt like a rehash yet, so hopefully that keeps up.

So my answer? "Dark Souls is the best and I expect Dark Souls III to be equal" just because it could swing either way and I have no idea. Noncommittal, I know.